Tuesday, September 05, 2017

salon |Identity politics was conceived and
executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism
has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part
it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like
to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics
of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or
if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that
must not invalidate the American version of identity politics.

For
example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not
critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his
own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the
“alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives
some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous
assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity
after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But
it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to
fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the
constraints of identity politics.

To
conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from
various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its
adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic,
primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity
politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing
rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity
politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of
community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable
result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman
abstraction.

This
depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking
out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer
accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity
politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests,
for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) —
seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations
divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The
situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so
that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything,
resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam.
Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity
politics for the duration of the imperial game.